Increased access to the Internet has had the unintended effect of increasing the reach of software programs that capture personal information of users without their informed consent (“Spyware”) or that corrupt computers without the user's knowledge and informed consent (“Malware”). In addition, a cottage industry has arisen in software that automatically downloads and displays advertising while an application is being used (“Adware”).
Such programs, when installed on the user's computer, can eavesdrop on the user, collect sensitive information and, in some cases, take control of the user's computer. In some cases, these software programs send messages out to other computers or servers, providing a conduit for the transfer of potentially sensitive information.
Another result of the increased access to the Internet is a rapid rise in the use of multimedia within sites focused on news, shopping, and entertainment, among others. The rapid rise in online media consumption has fuelled an equally rapid increase in the amount and sophistication of online attacks. Standard anti-virus software suites attempt to detect potentially malicious files through signature matching and other advanced heuristics. However, as the size of media files, such as movies, grows exponentially, the use of signature matching and heuristics becomes more and more difficult as well as very processor-intensive. The other rising challenge is in detecting what attackers may be able to embed within an otherwise innocuous media file.